Did you think I would not come for you? he whispers, as gentle as a lover.
And then she feels steel through her gut, and the world crashes down.
Nura wakes up gasping. She empties her stomach, then collapses onto the floor, reeling from what she had seen. She is covered in sweat and blood.
It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, except for what she had seen.
It is real.
Of this, she is certain. She had been trained extensively in the art of deploying and unraveling illusions, and she knows the difference between falsehoods and the truth. Seering is rare, but not unheard of. And she felt the truth in it. The certainty of what she had seen — that it was a horror still to come — burrows deep into her bones.
She is so terrified that she can barely breathe.
But then, she forces her mind to work. This is what she does. She thinks her way out of the impossible.
Fey. They are Fey. She saw those pointed ears. They could be nothing else. Everyone thought they were extinct, but everyone had been wrong.
And they are coming. Here.
When? She can’t be sure. The Ara she saw was the Ara she knows, not one of some distant future, but could it be tomorrow? Next month? Next year?
Maybe there is time. Time to stop it from happening.
Who will believe her? Who can she trust?
No one.
She had dragged herself to the top, but in the wake of the war, the Orders are fractured and weakened. And, worse, she is alone. She is not loved or trusted. She is not respected, at least not more than her title demands.
So who would she bring this to? A thirteen-year-old queen? Zeryth Aldris, that self-obsessed idiot? They will either laugh her out of the room or use this as evidence of her slipping sanity.
No.
Her fear settles into resolve.
She had ended the Ryvenai War by doing what no one else would. One day she would suffer in the afterlife for it. But now, she has nothing left to lose.
There is nothing — nothing — that she will not sacrifice to protect her people.
Nura staggers to her feet, casting one more glance at the listless body on the table. And she begins to make a plan
The next morning, she goes to the Arch Commandant’s office. He is sitting there with his feet up on his desk, being disgustingly smug.
She slides into a chair across from him “I think we have a problem.”
“Do we?” He doesn’t look up.
“There was another rebellion this morning. How long are we going to pretend that Sesri is capable of ruling this country?”
Now she has his attention. Zeryth’s eyebrows arch. “How uncharacteristically blunt of you, Nura.”
“I’m tired of waiting.” She leans forward. “I’m ready for action.”
Every night, she tries to Wield Reshaye. Every night, she fails. The exhaustion is beginning to take a toll on her, but she hides it carefully, just as she buttons up her scars beneath her jacket each morning. As much as she resents it, she has started to give Reshaye the blood of others. It does not hate anyone as much as it hates her, but still, it will not accept anyone.
“What about Maxantarius?” Zeryth says one day, after yet another failed attempt. “We know it likes him.”
“No,” she says, too-quickly. Then, slower, “No. He won’t do it, anyway.”
The truth is that she cannot bring herself to pull him into this, not after he has already lost so much, not after what she had done to him. But the weeks wear on, and she grows more desperate. Finally, when Zeryth proposes it again, she is silent for a long moment and says, “Maybe. When you get back, maybe.”
Zeryth leaves for Threll that afternoon. He will be traveling for many months. She does not like the idea of letting him out of her sight for so long, but he has connections in Threll, and if one of them is to be across the ocean, she would rather it be him. Zeryth has his useless political ambitions in Threll, but more importantly, the Threllian continent holds many magical artifacts — Reshaye itself had been brought to Ara from across the sea. Maybe, the two of them theorized, he would be able to find an alternative there.
Zeryth is less urgent about this than she would like. But he, after all, believes this merely to be a game about a crown. She knows it is so much bigger.
And so, Zeryth travels, and she waits.
Until a Fragmented girl, bleeding and feverish, collapses at their door.
It is nothing more than a hunch at first. But Nura confirms it, again and again, feeding the Threllian girl’s blood to the creature drop by drop until the entire vial is depleted. Every time, Reshaye’s silver magic rises up to meet it, accepting the blood willfully instead of leaving it to roll off of the vessel’s pallid skin. The answer is clear.
Later, she goes to the Fragmented girl’s room. She is gravely ill, and her back is a patchwork of tattered flesh. The work of a monster. It was a miracle that the girl had managed to make it across the ocean alive. Nura supposes that proves some sort of grit, even though the person lying in the bed before her looks weak and delicate.
This foreigner, by some ridiculous twist of fate, is their only chance.
Their one chance.
Every time Nura closes her eyes, she sees the destruction she had witnessed in her vision. There is not a single second that she isn’t aware of exactly what’s on the line.
They had tested thousands. Reshaye likes this one, and this one alone. They can not mess this up. They need every possible chance at success.
And that is when Nura decides that her old friend needs to be involved, after all.
It is easy to control someone who wants something so much.
From the moment Nura meets Tisaanah, she sees
